An online newspapers might make $3 per thousand views, plastering ads everywhere and maybe videos. That means they survive with way less than 1 penny per view. They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.
> They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.
But that's just what you proposed. $0.09 is over an order of magnitude greater than $0.003. That pricepoint would still be fine - far less than the price of a coffee.
If there were an extremely convenient way to pay a few pennies for access (a price low enough that I wouldn't think twice), they'd be making something, at least. I'm not about to go through the hassle and cost of subscribing for a month, to access a single article, and neither is anyone else here.
I understand that this 'one shot' model isn't necessarily representative of how their website is generally used, of course.
> a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should charge 40-50 cents for them.
For a physical copy.
Disregarding current promotional prices, The Guardian charge £12/month for a digital subscription. New York Times is £8 for 4 weeks. Not sure how many articles the typical reader gets through though, or how that should inform our thinking here.
A more realistic price might be $1-2/article since the median reader won’t be that interested. Pricing schemes that increase the total reading cost on a log curve can be imagined.
Of course we dream of a micropayments system fluid enough that people start consuming 10-100x the content so the price per piece can go down accordingly, but that is unlikely since there isn’t that much free time. A first mover might accumulate a lot of new readers, but that would eventually even out.